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What is Ruby on Rails?
Robby Russell writes "ONLamp.com has published another article by Curt Hibbs titled, 'What is Ruby on Rails?.' In this article, Curt goes on to discuss all the major components of the popular Rails web framework and shows it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. This article highlights all the major features, from Active Record to Web Services, which are going to be included in the upcoming 1.0 RC release of Ruby on Rails. With one book published already and four more on the way, do you think Rails will continue gaining as much popularity in the coming year?" An interesting follow-up to the two part tutorial from earlier this year.
Actually no, Rails has heavily inspired many developments in many languages over the last year. Pretty much every framework currently at least is looking at the stuff the rails guys are doing and whether some of the concepts are viable. Stuff like Seam which also is excellent is heavily inspired by the ease of use metaphor of Rails, and the Prototype javascript libary used by rails currently sort of becomes a defacto standard for more advanced javascript stuff with many projects building on top of it. Rails definitely does not scale into the average J2EE project dimensions, but it has its merits and definitely made huge inroads in the web development domain over the last year.
Actually many web developers keep a constant eye on rails, I am heavy into J2EE and like it, especially the stuff which is coming along Seam, Spring, JSF and EJB3, but almost every one I know who works in the domain, keeps an eye on rails as a fallback option for quick small webapps. Besides that many concepts and libaries currently are heavily evaluated for inclusion into other frameworks.
Dear Slashdot:
At this point, I am quite aware of Ruby on Rails. It is agile, the next big thing, etc. Could you possibly link a few more half brewed articles about AJAX, Ruby, and Rails? "Ruby's the next big thing!" "Ruby's hot!" Wow, really?! It certainly has more hype than anything else out there. I think if it was really that good, there would be less people hyped about it and more people actually using it. I've heard about 50000 people say it is the next perl. Of course, with perl6 highly late, who knows what will happen.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
People who say that business logic never belongs in the database are people who tend to be application developers. They are committed to a client platform (say j2ee), and database platforms (oracle and postgres and the like) vary from client to client.
People who own data on the other hand tend to have the database platform constant, but need to get at it and manipulate it from multiple platforms (j2ee, perl, VB, Access etc.) A viable definition of "database" in my book is a collection of data that is organized to be reused across apps.
A choice algorithm I'd use is this: If it has to do with the logical consistency of the data, it belongs in the database tier. If it is only possible to meet the needs of the project you are doing in one way, choose that way. Otherwise decide what part of your system is least likely to change, try to put as much as you can there.
The closest I can get to my self imposed ten word limit is this:
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I can't feel frameworks take away my control. It's like I want to do all those things myself, even though I know I can't do it as good as them. Also, I don't know if I can ever really understand what it is, only that I have to type something like :scaffold whatever and I'll hit the ground running. Wonderful, but...
I feel like the real skill of development lies in making stuff like that, and if it becomes defacto, all you do is build applications from building blocks. I feel it takes away some of the 'art' of development. You'd say, oh I build a nice webshop, and the other person would sya, what did you use, and your answer wouldn't be php, mysql, some html/css and javascripting. It'd be Ruby on Rails, of Smarty Templates combined with some Data Access layer, or a whole lot of those java spring/hibernate thingies. And all you did was tie up the ends.
I know it makes no sense not to use it, it's much a better choice. Make more money, easier, faster. But still, there's that feeling, know what I mean?